The Compliance Rates of Hand Hygiene in Intensive Care Unit and Surgical Services at a State Hospital in Turkey

Healthcare-associated infections (HAIs) cause many problems as prolonged hospitalization, consumption of resources as well as increased morbidity and mortality, increasing cost and antimicrobial resistance. The protection methods are important in HAIs as well as other infection diseases (1). Hand hygiene practice is one of the most effective measures to prevent HAIs (2). Although hand hygiene is an effective and simple method, hand hygiene compliance among health care workers is very low (3). SUMMARY Objective: The most efficient and most cost effective method for preventing health care associated infections is hand hygiene. Although hand hygiene is the most effective and simple method, compliance rates are very low among health care workers. It was aimed to evaluate the rates of compliance of healthcare workers in a state hospital. Material and Method: In this study, totally 112 healthcare workers (31 doctors and 81 nurses) were evaluated with the 5-indication observation method in a period between January and July 2013. Results: A total of 754 (65.9%) out of 1.144 cases were resulted in accurate hand washing and hand-rubbing. When the intensive care unit and surgical clinics were evaluated together, it was found that hand hygiene compliance rates were 51.26% in 199 cases and 66.85% in 591 cases for doctors and nurses, respectively. Conclusion: Consequently, we think that preinformed observations are important training instruments for hand hygiene compliance.